Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  “I didn’t want to sing about Johnny Rotten,” said Booji Boy’s alter ego, Mothersbaugh. “So I changed it to Johnny Spud. And I inserted a line—‘Rust never sleeps.’” The slogan—which adorned Booji Boy’s diaper that night—dated back to Devo’s graphic-arts days, when they were promoting an automobile-rust-proofing outfit. “We saw ‘Rust never sleeps’ as referring to corruption of innocence, de-evolution of the planet,” said Mothersbaugh. Neil Young would nick Booji Boy’s impromptu mumbling both to rework the new song and for the title of his next album.

  Young would interpret the line in his own way. “It caught my ear,” Young told Mary Turner in 1979. “I thought, ‘Wow, right off they wrote better lyrics than I did.’ I can relate to ‘Rust never sleeps.’ It relates to my career. The longer I keep going, the longer I have to fight this corrosion.”

  Young didn’t give rust a chance. Shortly after the Different Fur session, Joel Bernstein visited Young in his studio, where he played his guest the All-Insect Orchestra version of “Hey Hey, My My.” “It was hugely loud. Neil said, ‘I’m gonna play this for Crazy Horse, and they’re gonna learn this.’ That’s where the whole Rust trip came from.”

  Young disputed this memory, but Poncho agreed. “We went to play ‘Hey, Hey,’ and we weren’t hittin’ it that good. Neil showed us the film of him playin’ it with Devo. I didn’t think we could ever play it that good, but that inspired us to play harder. From then on, we played the shit outta that song.”

  “I like it if people enjoy what I’m doing, but if they don’t, I also like it,” Young told Mary Turner. “I sometimes really like aggravating people with what I do. I think it’s good for them.”

  “Hey Hey, My My (Out of the Black)” certainly fit that bill. In a handful of stark lines invoking the names of both Elvis and Johnny Rotten, Young sticks a question in your face: Is it better to give everything you have, even if you might go up in smoke, or to give in, give up and turn into an old phony? It was a cliché, for certain, but as do most clichés, it possessed some sort of awful truth.

  Young was now thirty-two. He’d watched rock and roll go through many permutations and had already seen many of his peers fall by the wayside. “Once you’re gone, you can never come back,” he sneers, exposing the ultimate fear—and ultimate fate—of any rocker: irrelevance. Young understands all too well that rock is, as Richard Meltzer put it, about “a micro-moment.” But he isn’t about to pretend otherwise. Young’s awareness of the limited shelf life of rock (and himself) borders on paranoia, and his maniacal refusal to give in to the inevitable is part of what makes him so appealing. You know he’ll go down kicking and punching.

  Decades later “Hey Hey, My My” seems more pertinent than ever. Watching your heroes stumble around the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions or peddle their masterworks for TV commercials isn’t exactly the same thrill as, say, a ready-to-implode Bob Dylan on tour in 1966. With very few exceptions, rock isn’t like wine—it doesn’t age well. “Rock and roll will never die,” Young sings, but he also understands that rock and roll isn’t here to stay—that its impermanence is part of its greatness, and that it sometimes consumes its makers. One line in particular had Young’s peers and critics clucking: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

  People want a star to be flashy … they want something they don’t have to relate to as being human. Things that are human—you go away. You have your moment, then you go away. But stars are supposed to represent something else, I guess, in sort of a super-quality of—“It’s GREAT!” Then once it isn’t great, people don’t wanna hear about it, because it doesn’t satisfy their illusion. They want something to be bigger than life or whatever. So I think that’s where that came from—it’s better to burn out than fade away or rust, ’cause it makes a bigger flash in the sky.

  Interview with Mary Turner, 1979

  GRAHAM NASH: I don’t agree. I used to run on the school team when I was a kid. So many of the other people would run like fuck, and on the third lap of a four-lap race, they’d be dead, they’d be wheezin’ and coughin’ and couldn’t finish. I always wanted to finish. It’s the same with my life and it’s the same with my music—who’s to say that I won’t write some of my best stuff when I’m ninety? I saw Segovia at ninety-two. He fucking floored me. I understand we’re talkin’ about James Dean, Hendrix and Janis, all that stuff … with that kind of an attitude, Neil must be really pissed that he’s still alive.

  RANDY NEWMAN: What do I think of “better to burn out”? No way. I don’t believe that’s true. But I think it’s a great line for the song. You can’t resist it. It’s a writer’s line. When you’re a writer, you’re ruthless. You’d run over your own mother.

  A lot of American art is based on that—you live for twenty-four years, ya do everything, die young, really fire it up. A lot of kids, they get real famous, real big, they believe they have to live their lyrics. It’s horseshit. And it’s killed a few of them. You don’t wanna be on a tombstone that said, “Born 1960, died 1984.” What the hell’s the point? You wanna go on and on and on and last a long time, y’know?

  Maybe a kid isn’t gonna know it’s bullshit, but Neil doesn’t have to worry about that. He can’t edit himself.

  AHMET ERTEGUN: I believe that. I think it’s better to burn out than to fade away…. Fading away is not fun. Y’know what Neil means by that? He means it’s better to live out your days being very, very active—even if it destroys you—then to quietly … disappear. Isn’t that obvious? Isn’t that what it means? At my age, why do you think I’m still here struggling with all the problems of this company—because I don’t want to fade away.

  JAMES TAYLOR: I like to watch people burn out better than I like to watch them fade away … but I don’t wanna do it myself!

  TOWNES VAN ZANDT: Yeah. Exactly. As a matter of fact, Neil’s doomed to that. I am, too. That’s what we do. C’est la vie. *

  JOHN LENNON, David Sheff interview: I hate it. It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. If he was talking about burning out like Sid Vicious, forget it. I don’t appreciate the worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or dead John Wayne. It’s the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison—it’s garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson. Greta Garbo … I don’t want Sean worshiping John Wayne or Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious. What do they teach you? Nothing. Death. Sid Vicious died for what? So that we might rock? I mean, it’s garbage, you know. If Neil Young admires that sentiment so much, why doesn’t he do it? Because he sure as hell faded away and came back many times, like all of us. No thank you. I’ll take the living and the healthy.

  I wrote “Hey Hey, My My” in my house. Cowrote it with Jeff Blackburn—the line “It’s better to burn out than it is to rust”—Blackburn had that line in a song, and I said, “What did you say?” I called him up after I’d written the song and said, “Hey, I used one of the lines from your song. Want credit?”

  Some things just hit me over the head, y’know. That’s the way a lotta stuff happens with me. Other people say it and I hear it. It’s happening all around … you just gotta look for it.

  When I told Elliot what I was gonna do with Rust Never Sleeps, he thought I was fuckin’ crazy. I had it all written out—everything. When the Road-eyes come out, the boxes goin’ up and down, big amps and microphones. Everything that was in that show was all written out before I started. I had it in a school notebook, bought it down in Grenada. Elliot thought I was nuts. He really did. But that happens a lotta times when I want to do something radical or different, y’know, but we don’t give a shit. Elliot’s comin’ from a good place—his heart’s in the right place—but sometimes you have to ignore him because he’s not me. Like if Elliot wanted to produce my records, I’d fuckin’ kill him. He’s not doing what I do. He’s doing the business end.

  I spray-painted “Rust Never Sleeps” on the door to Elliot’s office. I said, “Now, there’s advertising. Everybody who come
s through here is gonna wonder what the hell that is, and you can tell ’em—my new album.” Didn’t cost a penny. Elliot’s still got the door.

  —You once said, “The audience decides everything.”

  To a great degree, I think so. The Rust audience was a very idealistic audience. They were ready to hear anything. Ready to believe anything. They wanted to. This audience today, they’re jaded compared to that. But a lotta kids aren’t jaded, they’re idealistic still—the young ones comin’ up—they want it to be good, they want it to be real. They’re not impressed with a lotta the shit that’s out there. But the music business wasn’t as big in the sixties. There weren’t any rules. There were FM stations that played fuckin’ everything. Whatever they wanted to play. It was great. There were no formats. Now music is a huge business.

  —Was Rust Never Sleeps a culmination of certain things? I dunno. It’s hard to remember what it was, actually. Yeah—it seems like it was the grand finale of a certain period.

  “It all started when I looked at the pile of amplifiers that I had when I was rehearsing,” Young said of Rust Never Sleeps in a 1979 interview with Mary Turner. “It was just such a gross pile of junk … there was no concept, it just all fell together … that’s why it was so easy. And when something’s real easy, I think that’s when it’s the best.”

  Larry Johnson recalls a sea cruise following Young’s wedding on August 2, where the subject of Elvis Presley’s fatal burnout came up. “We were in Miami on the maiden voyage of the Ragland. You could see that Neil’s wheels were just spinning.”

  Young hatched a preposterous idea for his next tour, starting mere weeks away: a very theatrical show with Crazy Horse. Instead of roadies scurrying about the stage, there were “Road-eyes”: creatures in long robes with glowing red eyes reminiscent of the Jawas from Young’s current favorite, Star Wars. Soundmen were dressed as Coneheads; David Briggs, in a white doctor’s coat, roamed the stage as Dr. Decibel. The stage was set with ridiculously oversized amps and speaker cases, a huge mike and an equally giant tuning fork.

  Looking tiny and childlike amid the absurd props, Young would “awaken” atop one of the speakers, hop down to pick up his acoustic guitar for a solo segment, then be joined by the Horse for some eardrum shattering. The show was bookended by rock milestones played over the PA system: Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” Chuck Berry’s “School Days.” In between sets were stage announcements from Woodstock. Not only would the entire crew be involved in the performance, so would the audience: “Rust-O-Vision” glasses were distributed, purportedly enabling folks to watch Young decay before their very eyes. Group art at its finest.

  The Rust tour opened at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, on September 16, 1978, and closed at the Forum in Los Angeles a little over a month later, on October 24. In addition to the mountain of props and costumes (“I remember when Neil first suggested to the crew guys that they were all gonna blacken out their faces and put on these stupid robes,” said Jeannie Field. “I’m sure eighty percent said, ‘No way, man.’ But ultimately they all did it.”) Young was also pioneering the very first wirelessmicrophone system, which he tested first at the Boarding House. This led to some hairy moments, like in Rochester, New York, when they were broadcasting on a very illegal frequency and momentarily lost the signal during the show.

  Crew member Bob Sterne saw the work-intensive tour as just another one of Young’s lessons in “how to do the ridiculous. The Rust tour was a fuckin’ nightmare on one level, because you’re out there jerkin’ around, tryin’ to do stuff nobody knows how to do, and the shit didn’t work and everybody was apprehensive and it was on the edge of bein’ more work than you could do—but the fun of the show bailed you out of that.” Everybody was part of the act, even David Briggs’s son, Lincoln, who, as one of the Road-eyes, recalls looking out at a sea of people wearing their Rust-O-Vision glasses. “Twenty thousand fucking people staring at you with little cardboard blue-and-red glasses. It was the most surreal thing.”

  “It was incredibly loud, unbelievably loud,” said Joel Bernstein of the Rust Never Sleeps concerts. “Loud enough that when we did the L.A. show, the entire guest section left during the second electric song. All the record execs—Geffen, Ahmet—left.” One angry reviewer went so far as to suggest that sound mixer Tim Mulligan should have his head strapped to a Concorde jet.

  The fat, filthy opening smack of “Hey Hey, My My” announced a crazy new era for Young and Crazy Horse. The punk Zeitgeist had gotten a couple of hooks into Young’s brain and out poured hopped-up, abrasive sludge. This was insane music and even some Horse fans were shocked when they encountered the new Rust-model Young.

  “I’m usin’ too many covers / I’m warm now, so I don’t care,” screams Young in the paranoid “Sedan Delivery.” A version of the song recorded two years before had been lumbering and dreamlike; the Rust version doubled the time, dropped the most revealing, hopeful verse and concentrated on the nightmare. The brain-dead “Welfare Mothers,” with its absurd, heartfelt chorus of “Welfare mothers make better lovers—divorcée!” also charged along at (for the Horse) breakneck pace. What a concept: Young and Crazy Horse making their own boneheaded brand of punk rock.

  Certainly the tour was a triumph for the Horse—“After Rust, no one ever asked me why I played with Crazy Horse,” Young would tell the press—although in retrospect, Poncho felt that it foreshadowed hard times for the band. “It was really loud onstage,” he said. “We were really separated, especially Neil and I. For me it wasn’t a lot of fun, ’cause I couldn’t hear what we were doin’. We didn’t really play off each other. We were just bashing away.”

  Culled from overdubbed live performances from the Rust tour and the solo stint at the Boarding House, plus two studio cuts, Rust Never Sleeps was released in July 1979. A double album of Live Rust followed in November, along with a very oddly edited movie of the Cow Palace performance from October 22, 1978. It was a period of manic activity for all involved. “Neil went to Florida,” said David Briggs. “I went and bought a half ounce of cocaine and, in one week, assembled the entire Live Rust album and movie soundtrack. In a week. Y’know, it’s not the drugs, it’s the attitude that goes with ’em.”

  Rust Never Sleeps opens with the mournful solo acoustic “My My, Hey Hey” and ends with the unrepentant declaration of the alternately titled electric version. * In between, Young floats through a landscape of pool sharks, mad scientists and the American Indian. Veering away from the confessional approach of the past, Young pulls back his focus for a wider picture.

  These are vivid story-songs that, grouped together, portray a savage, untamed America where violence is inescapable and survivors laugh off their wounds. “Pocahontas” speaks of genocide but ends with a whimsical meeting between the Indian beauty, Marlon Brando and Young (who audaciously wishes to sleep with Pocahontas “and find out how she felt”). “Ride My Llama” has Young getting high with extraterrestrials. The verbal spew of “Thrasher” is intoxicating, with Young wandering all over space and time, pausing to shoot an arrow into the complacent hearts of his superstar CSN buddies: “They had the best selection, they were poisoned with protection / There was nothing that they needed, nothing left to find.”

  “Powderfinger,” a song Young started at the Topanga ranch of David Briggs in the late sixties and finished at Billy Talbot’s place in 1975, is nothing short of extraordinary. Young has a knack for hooking you with the first few words of a song, and from the knockout opening line—“Look out, Mama, there’s a white boat coming up the river”—Young paints a picture as rich as any John Ford Western. It’s the story of a kid barely past his teens who finds himself alone against a band of marauders, dead before he can get off his first shot, seeing his face flash in the sky and dreaming of “so much left undone.” Somehow Young conveys the feeling of a soul leaving the dying body behind. * With its odd, affecting scenes of past, present and future, Rust Never Sleeps was,
in many ways, Young’s most psychedelic canvas yet—American history by way of a bong hit.

  Young’s guitar attack changed completely with Rust. Gone were most of the lyrical epiphanies of the 1975–1977 period. In their place were massive sheets of noise—gunky distorto headache music, gloriously displayed on Live Rust, which was Young’s first live album (disregarding CSNY’s tepid 4 Way Street). After dismissing his work for years, even the most hardened mainstream guitar snobs began to take notice. “When he plays the guitar solo at the end of ‘Southern Man’ he sounds like a guy who can’t really play the guitar but has found a way of making highly effective noise with it,” wrote Geoff Nicholson. “By the time of Live Rust he sounds like a guy who can really play and has incorporated that noise-making into a highly sophisticated technique.”

  A lot of Young’s experimentation was driven by a new custom-built stomp box that enabled him to jump back and forth between a gang of different effects—and combine them—without the signal loss common to such rigs. Mr. No Extra Stuff had suddenly gone effects-crazy, and one clue as to why might be the figure that graced a button Neil wore on his guitar strap throughout the Rust tour: Jimi Hendrix. Young was certainly aware of the guitarist, having marveled at the rawness of his 1967 debut single upon hearing it at Jack Nitzsche’s house (Neil even played a tiny bit with Jimi during the Stills/Hendrix blowout jams of the Springfield days), but Young only studied the music in earnest years after Hendrix’s demise. Leave it to Young to wait for years after the guy died to get really excited.

  When Hendrix first came out, I thought he was great, but I never studied his records. Late seventies, mid-seventies—that’s when I started really listening to him. I never really knew him that well—talked to him a couple of times. For my money, he was the greatest electric-guitar player who ever lived.